


the hour for teeth

by ryyves



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Character Study, Child Abuse, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gen, Referenced Physical Abuse, an experimental piece, featuring: a canon-improbable sandstorm, kid Juno and Benten, mostly just Symbolic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-09
Updated: 2020-11-09
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:47:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27461431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryyves/pseuds/ryyves
Summary: A sandstorm hits Oldtown, trapping Juno, Benten, and Sarah inside.This is not a quarantine piece.
Relationships: Benzaiten Steel & Juno Steel, Juno Steel & Sarah Steel
Comments: 3
Kudos: 17





	the hour for teeth

**Author's Note:**

> This was extremely cathartic to write, and it's been sitting on my Scrivener for weeks. Most of what I read is postmodern or poetry so this fic is experimental that way. Would they actually die if a sandstorm like this hit? Probably. Anyway peace.

“I need you boys to listen to me,” she says. This is before the siren wails, before the gates swing closed, before the mass of dusty bodies in the street, but already Juno can hear the faint underwater echo of sand against the old dome. They have been through storms before in their five years in Oldtown, Juno and Benten’s birthday approaching and marked on every surface of the house, the big double digits, and Benten is talking about the cake they both know they’ll never have. Their names in cursive scrawl, in bold pink letters. Candles are a fire hazard in their building, as are space heaters and heated blankets and everything that keeps the winter cold out for long enough to sleep. They have climbed out onto the curb, the fire alarm blaring up and down the block, the midnight crowd crushing their bodies against Ma’s side, everyone looking for smoke. It is bad enough to go to sleep hungry, but worse to go hungry and cold. On nights like those, Benten huddles beside Juno in the bottom bunk, both comforters pulled up over their heads, their breath keeping them warm and their legs still shivering.

In the morning, of course, they are embarrassed, the way children are who have no precedent of touch. They make Benten’s bed. They dress in their warmest clothes.

It is not winter now. It is not much of anything, the sky red through the dome, hungry as blood. Humming like it, anyway. The sound of sand hitting the dome less a trickle of noise and more a swell, symphonic. A single entity penetrating the shields.

“You need to go to the kitchen and stay there until this storm passes. Before…”

They know better than to ask _before what._ They have been here for years and every time the sirens ring they sound a little less convincing, a little more like proof that this, too, is survivable, as it has been every time since.

Of the bedrooms of the apartment, Ma’s is the one with the smallest window. It’s high and doesn’t let in the sun so much as pale whispers of light. Or maybe it’s just the thick plastic curtains Ma put up around it, light-blocking. Maybe it’s that Juno has been inside never, and has seen it only around her elbow. The shapes within like monsters, open-mouthed and languid. Juno and Ben’s room has a tall, flimsy window with no curtains and no blinds, their bunk bed pushed up almost against it in the cramped space, which means that when the sand comes in—it always does, the dome shuddering beneath it—it covers the glass entirely. It soaks the room like bathwater. But the kitchen has no windows and the glass in the adjacent living space is far enough away that Ma is right. So Benten takes her hand and she leads them into the kitchen. Its door wobbles when it slides aside, clanking in the wall. Ma clicks on the light, its naked yellow bulb deepening the hollows of her cheeks. The light is so thick Juno could swallow it.

The kitchen is big enough for them to stand without falling over, a table set against the wall and a long, narrow space between counters. Ma leaves the door open. Turning back, Juno sees the red over Oldtown through the living room window, the air already choking on it.

They have just slotted themselves together, Juno careful to brush Benten but not Ma, the gesture a silent defiance he hasn’t voiced even to Ben, when the siren blares. It comes from the whole city at once. It rises up from the pavement, chitin stones long since abandoned for more efficient, accessible architecture; it seeps out of the buildings, out of the walls holding Juno against his mother and his brother, the kitchen table digging into his waist. Ma’s hand falls on his shoulder, and he doesn’t flinch. She would not lay a hand on him now, with her voice like that, panicked and almost worried. Almost like she cares.

She would not, he wants to think, but he knows that she could. He knows the shape of the distance between them, her body hot and shaking. Under the water-damaged ceiling, they are miniatures, their personhoods erased.

And the sirens ring.

Benten is stoic without meaning to be, and vulnerable without meaning to be as well. When his hands rise to his ears, they shift the equilibrium the three of them stand in. Juno looks to Ma first — the flash in her eyes, an expression he can’t read but that means _run._ Then he meets Benten’s eyes,

“I told you to stay calm.” It is not a shout, not yet, but it hits Juno like it is. Something crumples like origami in his chest. Her voice is swallowed by a new wave of siren calls.

“It’s gonna be okay, Ma,” says Benten. He doesn’t touch her, but Juno can feel the way his voice reaches out, like he could touch her this way and be safe. Juno knows his brother should not have to carry Ma on his shoulders, but the alarm is in his skull and he can’t think and he understands why Benten would want to say it. Ma’s panic terrifies Juno more than any of his own.

Sarah’s hands brush his head, tousling his thick hair. “Yeah. Yeah, I know that. What’s another sandstorm? This planet isn’t getting me and my little monsters that easily.” She sinks into a chair at the table pressed against the wall, her hand sliding off Benten’s head, down to his elbow. By the end, she is talking to herself, so Juno looks at Ben.

Then the bulb flickers. For a second, a reddish black. The alarm blares, burning Juno’s ears. It is so loud he shuts his eyes, as though depriving himself of one sense could deprive the others. Benten’s hand reaches for his.

The black spreads out, shocking and absolute. Juno looks to where the window would be and sees nothing. His eyes sting with the effort of making anything out.

“It’s,” says Ma’s voice, eerie in the dark. Echoing. Juno doesn’t know where her body is, where her hands are, the whites of her eyes, only that she is at the table and he has not sat down yet. “Fuck.” Juno grips Benten’s hand until it twitches.

Ma says, “It’ll be back. Just give it a moment.”

Between screeches of the siren, Juno can hear human voices above and beneath them, the apartment walls thin enough that Juno knows the whole residence can hear every time Sarah gets angry. People are mulling out into the streets. He has seen it before, the bodies contorted, every hand reaching for a locked door, every body piling upon each other, breaking their spines to get out. It sounds like an exodus, trapped in the tepid breath of Oldtown.

“It’ll be okay,” says Ben again. He shouldn’t have to do this, clean up the mess, lay down stepping stones for the rest of them to cross. Benten says it with conviction and a complete lack of affect that makes Juno certain that it is an instinctual response rather than a genuine conviction. Meanwhile the storm slams against the dome, a rattle that cracks across the district. The black gets redder.

“Yeah, damn it, I know it’ll be okay. Just let me… think, okay? Just be quiet so I can…” Her voice trails off, and then the sound of elbows hitting the table followed by a heavy sigh.

Benten rolls his fingers in Juno’s hand until Juno releases him. Juno can hear every breath, but he can’t always make out whose is whose. It is midday, and the apartment a deep maroon, where shades of red rather than shadows form the shape of Ma’s body, the table, Benten standing stiff and unsure deeper into the kitchen. How quickly the storm crept up on them, Ma sensing it like a cat seconds before it hit, how quickly it overtook Hyperion City. Nothing moves, and then abruptly the siren goes off. In the silence, Juno’s ears ring. He is swimming in the absence of sound, in the full sound of three ragged breaths.

 _Is it over?_ Juno thinks, and then Ben says it for him.

“No,” says Ma roughly. “That was just the beginning. If it’s this dark…” She seems to be talking to herself, but Juno hasn’t yet cracked the code of her voice and with the echo still in his head, it hurts to try to pinpoint it. “Don’t either of you start crying about this.”

There are no tears hovering on the edges of the scene, no sniffles, just panicked silence heavy as spilled soup. The first wind hits the building, shuddering and cold. It screams against the window glass, scrapes up and down stonework. The red swirl outside shimmers in Juno’s vision.

Ma’s voice shakes, and her conviction falls flat. “Nothing’s going to hurt you.” She sounds like she’s looking for a way out. She is scanning her exits, checking for her keys. She is afraid, Juno thinks. When the thought hits him, it digs deep. But it is not the sandstorm that worries her; he is sure of this. She is afraid of him and his brother, of their need, their fear.

The chair screeches against the floor, pushes into Juno’s body, pauses, pushes again. The red shape of Ma unfurls itself, rising in the dark. “I have to check on something. Make sure… something works. Anything. You boys stay here, ’kay? Just stay calm and stay put.”

Juno nods. Ma says, “I need you to promise me.”

“We’ll be fine,” says Juno, harsher than he needs to be.

Ma sighs. Then, as abrupt as the siren’s cessation, she sweeps out of the room. Juno counts her steps down the hall, though he doesn’t have to wonder which room she goes into. The casual dismissal burns in Juno.

“Will we?” says Benten when the bedroom door closes, as though he is not on fire too. The bedroom doubles as Ma’s office, though Juno doesn’t know what office work she does anymore. She’s had three interviews in the past six months, all for jobs entirely unrelated to her career at North Star. She dresses up, puts makeup on, takes the bathroom for an hour smoothing her blouse into her skirt while Juno and Ben brush their teeth in the kitchen sink. She wears a lot of clothes with dramatic v-necks, a silver chain she fiddles with for good luck, statement earrings. She kisses them both on the head, smooths out their collars, says, “Wish Mommy luck.” So they do, dutifully.

She comes home livid and sweaty. She comes home shaking, but Juno can’t figure out what kind of emotion she’s shaking with. This must be how adults do job interviews, Juno decides. As far as he’s concerned, she hasn’t been trying hard enough.

Her last job ended with a screaming match on her comms that Juno could hear even with his hands over his ears on his bed, her words biting and cruel, that awful laugh going on and on. Her voice rose and dipped, and when Ben asked what it was about, she said, “Oh, nothing.” Neither of them believed it, of course, because every day Ma grows more volatile, less inclined to stand by the things she’s promised or the views she’s claimed to have, less likely to leave her bedroom but far more likely to snap when they knock.

But then, just to twist the knife, she said, “Things are going to be a little hard for a while. But I’m going to take care of you. I promise. Things will be better soon.”

Only Ben could ask, because Ben was the only one she would give a straight answer to. She didn’t read malice in Ben’s eyes.

And every time, Juno fools himself into believing it will end soon. He gives himself hope that this time, things will be okay. This time his mother will get her act together and keep a job, and put food on the table and curtains in the windows and new shoes beside the door. As it is, Juno and Benten glue their shoe soles to the canvas. They ration the boxes and cans in the cupboards and cut themselves on knives. They do their homework while cooking dinner. It’s routine, and it’s all Juno knows. His friends’ houses, after all, aren’t much better, Mercury with his alcoholic parents and Sasha’s late afternoons at school under the pretense of homework, not leaving until the parents of athletes swung by to shuttle them home, those dim cafeteria lights the janitor mops under, the shiny, sticky floors.

Juno seats himself on the chair Ma vacated, hard-backed and cruel.

“Yeah.” Juno’s voice is startled, growing bitter with each syllable. “We’ve lived through every really bad storm Mars has offered up. Would’ve killed her to stay, though, wouldn’t it?”

“Dunno,” says Ben. He hops up on the table — Juno can make out the sound of it, the shape of his shoulders. His eyes adjust slowly. “I think it’s better she… well, it’s just that she’s panicking.”

“How long do you think it’s gonna last?”

“It sounds pretty nasty out there.” It does. The wind rises like an orchestra and falls just as fiercely. And under it all, an eerie silence. A hungry vacancy. Oldtown could be abandoned with a silence like that. Juno can almost feel Ma’s presence behind her bedroom door, out of sight down the hall. It watches them; it breathes. Juno considers shutting the kitchen door, but inside, the kitchen is pitch black, a capsule in space, and the power hasn’t come back on yet.

And their mother left them. Closed the door, let them fend for themselves. Gave them the dark and promises even she couldn’t quite bring to her lips.

“Huh,” says Juno, and Benten says, “Huh,” back.

Juno reaches out to touch the wallpaper, water-stained and peeling. The last time he was out of Oldtown he was too young to remember, but he does remember that when they moved here, the wallpaper felt like a luxury. It had stars on it, crude renditions of the Solar planets in the bathroom, like the whole apartment was built for children younger than him. He doesn’t know if the wallpaper stretches into Ma’s office, doesn’t know if she’s peeled it away while trying to hold herself back from breaking something valuable. Not a lot is valuable to Sarah Steel, and Juno is often not sure he counts among them.

Because that is all there is to say, because the winds are so loud Juno can barely hear his thoughts, because the storm hits harder and harder with each wave, Juno and Benten sit in silence. They don’t touch. Their eyes adjust to the dark in increments. The pots piled in the sink, the dishes piled beside them. A sponge on the broken stove top. Glaring remnants of the mess Juno left there after breakfast, promising he’d clean up. If it weren’t for the storm, Ma would have noticed. He wonders if they still have water. He pushes his sleeves up and pulls them back down.

“Are you scared?” Juno asks Benten. His voice rings in his throat, but he isn’t sure how it sounds with the erratic clatter of sand against the window. It’s an old dome, yeah, but surely there shouldn’t be this much detritus. This much rubble. He speaks and his voice sounds surer in his head, more grown-up. He wants to know without having to look the answer in its eyes. He wants to know.

Ben laughs. Juno knows that laugh, overly-happy, overly-bold. “Nah. You?”

“No, I guess not,” says Juno.

In the end, Juno proposes dinner. They were told to stay in the kitchen so they do, though the space grows more and more cramped. It’s something to do, anyway, cooking. Benten hops off the table to open cupboards, reaching up. At one point, he hops up onto the counter, bracing his knees against the toaster to reach the highest shelves. While he rummages, Juno turns the faucet on. The water that comes out looks like nothing, but it’s cold against his fingers. He knows the noise they are making, knows how thin the walls are between the kitchen and Ma’s bedroom, has heard a thousand arguments through those very walls, splitting a sandwich with Benten while Ma raged into the phone or at herself. He counted his blessings. Maybe it’s selfish, but he is glad someone else takes the brunt of it.

It is hard not to see the past the same way the present plays out: his mother’s pinched face, grime on the windows, Oldtown hungry and wailing its misery up and down the streets, no quiet corners to escape from and always that drive to escape. His mother saying, _Not now, Juno, I can’t do this right now._ Always tired, always transitory, almost… liminal. Think of it like this: there is a door between his mother’s breaths that he fits his foot into. It is hard to believe in good when all you see is another angry face. The chin wrinkled, the nostrils from this angle always flared, the sharp lines of the shadows beneath her brow. 

Benten sets out a plate and pulls down a jar of peanut butter. “Do we have any jam?” he calls over his shoulder. For a second, Juno is sure he is going to fall, to let go of the cupboard handle and tumble. He has never been lifted in his dance class, he tells Juno. Juno doesn’t know much about dance but he thinks that’s a shame. There aren’t a lot of theaters in Oldtown, though the cultural district never got around to tearing itself down, and he has seen posters of dancers in tights lifting long-skirted partners in elegant twirls. How those dresses went out; how they obscured those drawn faces. When he’s caught staring, Benten’s eyes go wide, as though there is something blasphemous, something unfair, in the act of dreaming. The money spent on his lessons, his hours, even at this age, cleaning the changing rooms. Hyperion City never did much about child labor. Maybe the city just doesn’t care. He’s nine and old enough to pirouette and that means he’s old enough to earn his keep.

The fridge door sticks when Juno opens it. With the electricity cut, it’s dark and tepid. Mostly it’s empty, half a block of cheese that hasn’t gone moldy yet, opened cans covered with cling wrap, a bag of carrots. Most of what they eat comes ready-made from the cupboards. Mostly they have to think to last.

“Nope,” says Juno, and lets himself pop the _p_ the way Benten does. “Goes to show you.”

“Peanut butter sandwiches it is.” It is getting easier to hear each other speak, but it is also getting easier to imagine the path of the storm through their city. “My favorite.”

Without warning, Juno wants to confide something. He wants to lower his voice and lean in close and say _Listen, listen to me,_ like anything he could possibly say hasn’t already passed through Benten’s mind. He wants to take the peanut butter out of Benten’s hand where he is scraping the dregs of it in lean stripes across the fresh bread and say _What if I told you?_ But there is nothing to say. The moment doesn’t pass, but the storm picks up. The rattle against the window sounds like coins falling. If he went out into the storm and held out his hands, he thinks, but that’s thinking for kids and besides, Ma said to stay put.

Because it’s so dark, Benten doesn’t bother to cut their sandwiches. They sit at the kitchen table and eat off the same plate, not always sure whose sandwich is whose.

“I should get her,” says Benten, so the confession is his. The moment held between them shattering. The terrible heat that comes with the storm making Juno sweat through his t-shirt. Benten pulls his sweatshirt off and drapes it over his chair.

It is easier not to argue with Ben, so Juno says, “Sure, if you want to.” He doesn’t say what he’s thinking, which is, _Won’t she be mad?_ It is hard not to look deeper into Benten’s words, _We should get her,_ and not think about how easy it is for Benten to be the good twin, the twin Ma looks at without malice in her eyes. Maybe it’s a matter of proportion, distortion; maybe it would look like malice if Juno were in Benten’s shoes, but Juno has seen her brow soften enough times turning from him to Ben that he is confident in his assessment.

“I mean, she must be scared,” says Benten, soldiering on. “At least I have you to keep me company.”

“She’s lived through a lot more sandstorms than we have, and besides, she could have stayed.”

Benten chews slowly; Juno listens for the sound of it, but the storm has become a sort of tinnitus and he can’t even see his brother’s jaw moving. “Not Oldtown storms.”

“Hey, I’m not stopping you.” It’s as close to a truce as Juno is capable of. He hasn’t yet given up on changing his brother’s mind, but he knows well enough by now to be wary. To watch every raised hand, to jump before every piece of shattered glass hits the floor, to close the door. To close the door and sit against it until Ma is done, one hand on the handle even though it never turns. He imagines fists on the surface. She still doesn’t go into their room except to check the status of their waking-up in the morning. She walks them to the public bus. If he tallied the small mercies, they would rise high enough to drown him.

The dangers, as always, lurk at his feet. They lurk in Benten’s beating heart. The first time she slapped him, she apologized for ten minutes. She cried. She didn’t do it again for a year and a half. It’s hard to forget the first time something like that happens to you.

No, he’s lucky. He’s swimming in small mercies, and he doesn’t know the first stroke.

Beyond the kitchen wall sits Ma’s bedroom-slash-office, the long silence of it. Eerie, incandescent. The air burns with it, or maybe it’s the winds hurtling past at sixty mph. The peanut butter sticks to the roof of his hot mouth. The bread tears between his teeth. It tastes like old fabric.

“I’m going to do it,” says Ben, and then he doesn’t get up. He takes another bite. Juno can see him again, which is another mercy. Every second that their mother isn’t saying a word is a second Juno is overlooking. He tries to tune in, like dialing a radio, listening for the sounds that indicate rage or joy, listening to that wild, desperate laugh she sometimes gives when it’s hardest to read her. It is like Benten is looking for the courage to do it,

“Come on, she loves you. Let her in on your gourmet chef skills.” His teachers would call it unkind, his tone, his words, but this is Benten and Ben knows every thought Juno has ever had.

“Don’t make fun of me,” huffs Benten. At first, Juno isn’t sure whether he’s taken real insult, because the nightmare sky wipes away everything but voice, and Juno needs at least two senses to make out intention. So he is helpless, here between Benten and the door and their mother. The sense of aloneness that creeps through him is so cold he almost forgets about the sweat. She should be here, with them; she should stay away, because her panic only makes Benten’s fear stronger. How many times has Juno seen this same pattern play out, Sarah’s rising voice, Benten’s screwed-shut eyes, Juno calling _Quit it, quit it,_ like a referee.

“That’s not you, Juno,” says Benten. So maybe this is the conversation they’re having, out in the open, the plate empty and Juno licking his fingers and running them across the ceramic for breadcrumbs. These are the things Juno is saying and Benten is countering him like maybe none of what he knows is the truth. In his head, Juno makes his voice deeper, more grown-up. He is more in control. He is looking at himself from a distance, and he is doing all the right things.

Benten traces a finger along the rim of the plate and sighs.

He is standing in the hallway between his door and Ma’s, and somehow nothing is more frightening than that thin panel between their life together and their life with her in it. Than the potential of whatever she is with the lock turned. Benten knocks. It shudders through the house before the door slides open. “We made dinner, if you want some,” Benten says.

“Not now,” says Ma. “The stress isn’t good on my stomach.” And she isn’t angry, but despite the shock of it, Juno can still feel the weight of anticipated rage in his blood, so she might as well have been. Her fingers grip the door frame, nails bitten to bleeding, and all her hair is pulled back with a heavy scrunchie. There are dark hollows on her cheeks and around her eyes; her shirt falls over her body, obscuring it. He has seen people look at his mother as though she was desirable, and he saw hunger on every face. Her face looks like the one he sees in the mirror and avoids seeing in bus windows and car paint, the same cheekbones, that hanging mouth. On him, it looks ugly. On her, it just looks sad.

“That’s okay,” says Ben, and that could be that. “There’s enough for you anyway.”

“That’s sweet of you, Benzaiten,” she says, tousling his hair. Her hand snakes into the space between them, and the bedroom behind her looks like a mouth. Juno doesn’t know what his mother means when she says things like that, the careless compliments she drops on Benten and never on Juno, not sincere but like it’s easy. Again the rage rises in his blood, but he doesn’t leave the hall. He can’t leave Benten alone with her. And Ben is smiling, overlarge, because he doesn’t know how to do things in halves. “It’s a relief to know you’re looking out for me, but I’ll be okay.” And when the door closes, it devours her.

Benten turns back to Juno, his eyes bright and an expression on his face that Juno can’t place. “Now… we wait,” Ben says, and his voice is unreadable too. It’s soft and wet and bright and Juno can’t look at his brother. He comes back to the kitchen, and everything is safe.

“Yeah,” mumbles Juno. “We wait.”

Everything is a waiting game in Sarah Steel’s house: waiting on the winds to shift, for shards on the carpet, for someone’s voice, mostly hers but sometimes his, while the space between them diminishes, waiting for the upstairs neighbors who have sex, like clockwork, at nine p.m., which is long before Juno’s bedtime. Someone has to look out for Benten. Someone has to take the brunt of every wild hand, of every voice spitting his name. Benten should never have to live like that, with anticipation bitter always on his tongue, with his name a violent thing in his ears, forever.

And still her bedroom door, closed and vivid in his imagination. So what? Juno thinks to himself. It’s not that bad. And it isn’t, because he has Benten. Because even as the apartment becomes a monster, he has sharper teeth. While Ma hides behind her locked door, Juno rises out of his skin. He presses out of his mouth. Benten puts the plate in the sink to wash later and Juno rises, too, to become something he isn’t. He tiptoes across the hall into the cramped living space, but the light is brighter here so he slides between the sofa and the wall and puts his hand on the window. The city, above and below, is quiet, no trace of the milling crowds storming toward the exits to the rest of Hyperion City, all that panic, the whole city claustrophobic. He can’t see the sky. The windows rattle, and Juno’s fingers on the sill sink into sand. Maybe it is not as bad as he thinks it is, but he can’t convince himself. He can still hear noise from the kitchen, but Juno pushes up the window, just an inch, and a thin breeze shivers inside. It sticks inside his fingernails and he gasps.

When the window slams down, it just misses his fingers. His mother’s voice is a ghost in the air. “What are you doing?”

“I’m sorry,” Juno says automatically.

“I told you to keep yourself safe.”

But he has taken her place at the table, has put his knees up on her chair, has run his sticky fingers over the back of it. The two of them look out together, and then he faces her. Her face looks candlelit in the orange light, ominous, but it is not easy to walk out of this story. It is not easy to close the door. He is nine years old and preparing for puberty, for the inevitability of loss that comes with it. He wants a heartbreak he can face. That’s what she is, then: red as a heart.

“I wanted to see,” he says.

“Do you want to know first-hand what would happen if all that sand got in here?” she says, and she says more but he looks away, and that means he doesn’t have any evidence. He is waiting to know for sure, in words, what she’s doing. In words that mean what they look like. “Can’t you be more like your brother? I need you to keep yourselves safe, but you go right to the window.”

He has a quip on his tongue and then, between heartbeats, it falls flat. His voice is nothing against the clatter of sand, against her voice. “I’m sorry,” he says again, and that seems to deflate her.

“Perhaps I was harsh on you. Do you boys want to play a game? Surely that’s better than sitting in the kitchen.” Juno says nothing; he keeps looking at the space where his mother was as she goes to the box of board games. She crouches on her toes, and Juno can barely hear the sound of her rummaging.

While she lays out the board, Juno lets himself become the monster. Not the kind he is already, but the kind with sharp teeth made for tearing throats and a tongue hungry for blood and claws that leave marks on every door frame he touches. He rises out of his skin. He rises out of the room, Ma’s head bent over the game and her expression out of sight, her hair falling in great waves around her shoulders. He rises out of his skin; he can feel himself leave it. He is the ghost in the walls, the ghost of Halcyon Park, the ghost of Hyperion City, the ghost that sits on his brother’s shoulders and crushes him. He is the thing with teeth that shudders through the walls. He breaks with the pipes, screeches with the doors. He falls down around his brother’s neck before he realizes that Ben has crouched beside Ma, spreading pieces across the board. Juno must have played this game three dozen times, but he doesn’t remember any of the moves. All he knows is that the building shakes with his breath, shudders in and screams out. He is begging Benten not to look at him, and then Benten doesn’t, and that hurts more. He is standing in the corner, less a fly on the wall and more a trophy on display, his mother’s son. He is breathing through the walls of the house. He is closing in on his own shoulders.

And this, too: he is tiptoeing into his mother’s room. Here, like in her hall office years ago, he has never been inside. The dark sheets, he imagines, on the unmade bed. The desk—a nice desk, wood, more expensive than he knows she could afford—covered with papers, the wastebasket full. The single high window, the shoes scattered around the bedposts. But when Juno enters, it isn’t just a bedroom. It smells like her, and the thought clenches in Juno’s chest. It smells so much like her that he wants to tear the mattress to shreds; he wants to break the legs of the desk, throw the chair out the tall, high window. He is bigger than this house, bigger than this goddamn family, bigger than the scale of his name dripping onto his shoulders, his mother a slobbering thing above him. _Give her more credit,_ Benten would say, but Benten doesn’t know what it means to tear yourself apart. He doesn’t put his claws in himself first and the world second. He doesn’t have shadows in his eyes. No, he grins and it gives the world everything.

And Juno has been away for too long. He needs to hold the monster in him hard enough to stay by his brother’s side. The rending hour will come. The hour for teeth.

There are nights when Juno and Benten sit together on the bottom bunk, not touching and mostly not talking above whispers, not speaking of the monster. Because if they say its name, it will echo back at them as _Juno._ There are days when Benten cries for hours, when he turns Juno away at the door and sometimes locks it, sometimes leaves Juno in the living room with two locked doors. When he lets Juno in, his eyes are so red Juno can’t remember when he saw them white. He slinks back to the bed and lets Juno come in, and Juno says, first, _What did she do?_ But he doesn’t mean his mother alone; he means the world. He means anything that would ever touch his brother would have to face him first. He sleeps with his fists closed, and sometimes he swings them at Benten.

So he is the monster, after all. He doesn’t have to wait until he grows up to know. So he knows his mother more than his brother ever will, knows where the rage sits. It sits in his hands, in his quick tongue, in the thoughts hot as spilled blood, sharp as asphalt on his face. Someone is holding him down. He is suspended again, and his mother is shouting at some principal or headmaster on the other side of a closed door. She does this for him because she sees him. No one will ever see him the way she does, as he is. He is thinking he owes her loyalty for that.

He turns and leaves the door closed. He will have time, in the decade before he comes of age and gets the hell out, to tear this place apart. Mars is trying hard enough as it is, so he might as well leave it to its work. It’s doing one hell of a good job at it.

“You with us, Juno?” says Ma. To Juno, her tone feels like a black eye.

Juno has claws for fingernails and blood for saliva and he says, “Yeah, what? I’m here.” The board is all set up, dulled by the dark sky outside, on the farthest side of the living room from the window. He glances toward the kitchen. His body is too small for him. He flexes his fingers and finds his claws are just nails. He isn’t big enough to hold all the fight inside him. “Yeah,” he says again. “Let’s play.”

But he is a monster while his brother plays a board game with a woman who only says she loves them when she’s lying. Who chases both her sons to tears and laughs. Who says, _I won’t take this abuse from you two,_ when really she means Juno. He was born with something broken in him, and the only consolation is that Benten is whole. Ma breathes and it shakes the house; the storm breathes but it notices them less and less. He is the monster while Ma laughs until she snorts, while Benten joins her, and it is not that the shape of them looks like a family. It is that they are one, Juno reaching for the dice, Juno cursing until the sharp hiss of his mother’s breath brings him back, Juno jumping Benten’s piece while Ben shouts, “You jerk!” and they all laugh.

Juno almost think Sarah is going to stay.

Ma lets Ben win before rises, and Ben doesn’t realize that she was counting the seconds she had to spend with them. Ben sets up the board again. His tone leaves no room for arguing, but Juno argues anyway. She is saying, _Go to bed. Try to get some sleep. Don’t open the window._

“We should hide out, too,” says Ben. There’s an air of mischief in his tone, and his eyes are bright. Night is falling but his eyes are so bright. Ben is in the middle of a turn when he rises, and the shape of him looms monstrous in the dark. Juno has almost tuned out the storm, its roar in his ears. The house smells hot and stale and empty, and the carpet under Juno’s hands is thick and stiff. Any moment the window could shatter, and neither of them are far enough away to avoid its detritus. It was cruel for Ma to leave them in the living room. For all her big talk of safety and fear, she fell short on the follow-through. And his brother is a shadow in the dark, in the doorway maybe, or half a step from where Juno sits. The game pieces glitter with reflected light. All around them, the building is alive with sounds of pipes straining, of footsteps as other tenants move around in their own panic and the heavy-throat fear that the storm will rip through the dome and crush their building. Mostly Juno is not afraid. Not for himself, anyway. He can taste the sand already on his tongue. He can feel it under his fingernails. But he can see it in his head, the angle of one building after another, Oldtown built on top of itself, rickety and erratic, a ring of dominoes falling and then him going under. That’s where it ends, he thinks: going under. The quiet that will follow, his mother screaming, sand in his throat and Ben, somewhere Ben. That’s when the fear hits. The sand tearing through and nowhere to go. He has lived through sandstorms before and there has only been a little rubble to clean up, sand on the streets, listing abandoned buildings, broken windows, but this time the sky is darker. This time there is nowhere to go. This time the night is long and heavy before them and he is not tired enough, yet, to wait it out in sleep.

“I think you’re on to something,” Juno says instead.

Ben laughs, sharp and loud. “I always am.”

When Juno rises, his toe catches the game board. He feels it flip; he feels pieces scatter across his foot, and he shakes them off. He is on his knees before he realizes it, feeling in the sand-dark for pieces that have long since stopped glittering, gathering them in his hands.

Ben says, “Leave it.” But the fear is heavy in Juno’s throat. He is thinking about the next morning, about Ma waking up before him and finding the living room in disarray and knowing it was him. It is always him. It will always be him. Even in the anger, in the spit on his mother’s shoes when she’s not looking, even in his voice raised in a scream loud enough to garner a noise complaint, he knows his place. And he doesn’t want his brother to ever have to live there too.

He thinks he’s crying, the way he does only when he knows his mother is not listening, hiccuping, his breath shuddering, but not sobbing outright. His hand brushes a die and it skitters out of reach. He is lost in the dark. He thinks he is telling his brother, “I have to. I can’t—like this, I can’t—I have to—”

And then Benten’s hand is on his upper arm, the grip firm and strong, and Juno closes his eyes and draws in a shuddering breath. “I’m sorry,” Juno says.

“Let’s get out of here,” says Benten. It’s so composed that Juno is embarrassed. His breakdown, his show, the quiver in his voice. His fingernails digging into the carpet, tearing it up. He is not the one built for spotlights, for eyes on his with anything but wrath.

In their room, they keep their eyes open. Benten does stretches on the carpet while Juno changes into pajamas. His whole body folds over, and Juno is aware of the space they are filling. Juno is getting better at hearing around the storm, so he can hear Benten’s soft sighs. Juno lays back on his bed. If he closes his eyes, the worst will happen. As long as he can hear his brother’s breathing, they will see the morning.

“Juno, you there?” says Ben, and Juno realizes that he has become the monster again. He sits up, though in the dark he cannot feel his own body. Ben sits beside Juno on the bed and they don’t touch, and when Benten’s shoulder lands against Juno’s they look at each other in panic. Then Benten laughs and the moment passes. Benten’s arms are around Juno’s waist in a second. For a second longer, he holds on, and then that moment, too, passes. Being a brother is almost as complicated as being a son, and nobody ever told him the rules.

Hours pass. The apartment building sleeps and wakes with a start and sleeps again. If he strains, Juno thinks he can hear clicking from Ma’s room. He has to listen, because Ma cracks under pressure and Juno is the first line of defense between her and Ben, and often the only one. He stops thinking about the plate in the sink and the game board upturned on the living room floor. He and Ben talk but he doesn’t know what about, their voices raised because the window is thin and the storm still isn’t dying down. Oldtown drowned in sand, all those panicked people swallowed by it, Mars a hungry animal. Their alarm clock, its bright red digits, provides the only light source in the room. If Juno holds out a hand, he can see the outline of his fingers.

At length, Ben says, “You hungry?”

“Not really,” says Juno. He presses his tongue to the roof of his mouth and finds it dry. He speaks softly, as though every consonant is illicit.

“Ma hasn’t eaten at all, has she?” says Ben. In his voice, it is so simple, so easy, this neurotic care for anyone’s wellbeing but his own.

Juno says, “Let’s not.”

“Let’s not what?”

“Let’s just,” says Juno. “You don’t have to do that.” Without light to show his face, his voice is rough and cold. It doesn’t sound like a child’s voice.

“Well,” Ben says, “I’m getting something to eat. You can come with me or stay here, whatever you want. It’s just gonna be hard to portion with the storm like this.”

It is dark in the hallway, and Juno slides his bare feet down its cold floor. Up ahead, he can hear the sounds of Ben’s rummaging: cabinet doors swinging into the wall, rolling shelves clicking open, the heavy grunt as Ben pulls himself up onto the counter. A rattle he can’t place.

“Water still works,” Juno tells him. He is thinking about splurging, about kindness.

“Good to know.” The heavy roar of the faucet fills the room, out-of-tempo with the winds outside. Ma hasn’t come out yet, and Juno doesn’t know that he’d be happier if she had.

Reaching out, Juno’s hand finds the kitchen door frame and he holds on, pulling himself into the room. He doesn’t want to step in too quickly, doesn’t want to startle Benten. “Can you see what you’re doing?”

“Nope. I’m not gonna put my hand in the water, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Reassuring.”

“I know what our kitchen looks like,” Ben nearly snaps. “I’m not stupid, okay, Juno. You don’t have to take care of me. You’re not my mom.”

Juno closes his eyes, but that doesn’t make his head any quieter. He keeps his eyes closed while the sting rips through him, the way he holds his head under the covers when any monster wakes in the night. “What are you making?” he asks to sweep the moment behind him. It is too much to ask, _Should we be doing this?_ and to have to listen to Benten’s explanation. It is too much to explain himself. For Benten, it is almost easy.

“Mac-n-cheese, I think. I’ve got…” The sharp crunching is still in Benten’s voice when he says, “Some sort of disgusting pasta mix, so here’s to hoping for the best.” He pours the whole packet into the water with a sizzling sound and tosses the empty packaging aside. It thuds softly on the counter.

Mostly Ben cooks, and mostly Juno sits on the table and listens for anything that could go wrong. Slowly, they warm up to talking, the tension of the storm rolling off their shoulders with the boiling water. Ben stirs slowly with a plastic spoon that clinks against the edge of the pot. Juno is beginning to feel what the noisy mob felt when the siren first blared, his chest too small to fit his fear. He can feel his pulse under his skin.

They don’t have a timer and the electricity’s still down. Benten bounces on the balls of his feet while they wait, and Juno gives up on counting seconds after the first thirty-five. He pulls down two bowls and rummages quietly for silverware. Even in the dark, they know how to cook. Ben doesn’t squint once at the instructions. Ma’s cooking is terrible, and before Ben and Juno learned to do it themselves, they’d live for days on microwave food and cereal they gobbled down too quickly for it to go stale.

“We need another bowl,” says Ben.

“Don’t,” says Juno.

In a voice so sure it breaks Juno’s heart, Benzaiten says, “She’s our _mom._ ”

Juno says, “I didn’t say anything.”

“Sure,” says Ben, and then he lays out a joke so precise that Juno is sure he’s had it prepared exactly for a moment like this. But it makes Juno laugh.

In their bedroom, they sit on the top bunk and hold the bowls close to their bodies. Juno shovels it into his mouth with a greed he doesn’t always afford himself. They talk softly, about the sandstorm and their new friends and how mad Ma will be and the things they want to do tomorrow, when the sun rises. Juno doesn’t look at the door. This is how it should be, Juno and Benten and the raging world not touching them. A quiet place in Juno’s head, their bodies not touching, the storm falling still and the apartment holding its breath, every body stilled at once. Juno doesn’t notice it at first, the humming of pipes, the soft rumble of upstairs voices. When they scrape their bowls clean, Benten reaches out for Juno’s. He carries them down the ladder and sets them beside the door. Juno leans back in Benten’s bunk and stares at the ceiling, stares out the window where the faintest outlines of buildings have begun to reappear. The building creaks and Juno thinks it’s Mom, come to tell them to go to bed, come to see the kitchen a mess because her eyes have adjusted to the dark better than his. Still the faint whistle of wind inside Oldtown, still the fear that comes with it.

Instead, there is a shifting in the bed beneath Juno and Benten’s voice comes muffled from the bottom bunk. “’M gonna sleep here.”

Juno cuts his laugh short. “Suit yourself.” His body is heavy and he doesn’t want to move anyway.

The whisper comes after a very long time. “Hey, Juno?”

“Yeah?”

“I can’t sleep.” This is per course, Ben awake long into the night, Benten drowsy every morning, his body heavy. Benten waking Juno in the night just to talk to him.

“It’s gonna be okay. It’s gonna pass and… I’ve got you. I’ve always got you, ’kay?”

“Yeah, I know,” says Ben. “Nothing can get past Super Steel. Just… don’t fall asleep yet.”

“I won’t,” says Juno.

Juno wakes much later. It’s a deep russet-blue outside, and he can see the edge of the bed, but the building is quiet. He tiptoes down the ladder, picking up the bowls on his way to the door. Even in the flatness of his drowsy mind, he remembers them. He pauses by the flimsy window and runs his fingers through the sand that has gathered on the sill. His bare feet sink into sand. If he and Ben had noticed it, if they had been brave enough to step that close to the window, they could have stuffed sweaters into the gap. But Juno still remembers Ma’s presence behind him, the window slammed so quick he could see, for a single, vivid moment, his fingers coming off with it. Not blood, just terror, wave after wave of it. He brushes sand from the sill into the bowls.

They’re probably going to die from this, he thinks absently, but it doesn’t strike him as something that needs further consideration.

Without closing the door, he carries the bowls into the kitchen and sets them in the sink, where they clatter against the sides. The power is still out, though through the living room window, he can see lights in sections of the city. He runs the tap, letting the sand dissolve as it sinks into the drain. Something shifts in the hall.

Once, when Oldtown’s shivering dome was new to Juno, he was in the sewers when the lockdown bell rang. He heard it faintly from somewhere far above his head, from the walls, from his bones. He had run away from home, not for the first time and certainly not for the last. His trousers were soaked, and as the bells sounded, he found a platform to huddle on and held his knees close. Disoriented by the sound, he didn’t know where the closest exit was; he didn’t know the exit that would take him closest to home. He didn’t know, even, what to call home. All alone, without comms, without Benten knowing where he had gone, without even the rabbits who hadn’t gotten to know him yet, he held himself close and shivered.

And the storm swept into the sewers. Around him, the waters raged up his calves, splashing his face. It didn’t matter that the sirens had gone quiet, because the sewers were alive. He kept telling himself that Benten wouldn’t worry about him, and eventually he believed it. He kept telling himself, over and over while Oldtown shattered around him, that if he was going to survive on his own in this world, then he had to survive this. Even if his city broke, he wouldn’t. It was so much easier to weather these days with his brother. In the sewers, he choked on the dark.

He was down there for hours, cold and wet and alone, long after the second set of bells rang and the sky cleared. He coughed up half a lung before he reached the surface.

And Benten was worried, of course, but they were young enough that Juno could spin it into an adventure for him. He made the waves bigger, made himself braver.

Juno can feel sand in his lungs now, too, sand coating the floor. The kitchen floor, however, is clean, and Juno takes a moment to wipe his feet on the tile, relishing the sensation. He shuts the faucet off.

There is a shape standing in the open door to his bedroom, tall and dark. A loose jacket hangs over her shoulders, obscuring her figure. She has one hand on the handle, her face in profile, her expression inscrutable. Her hair is wild around her shoulders. Juno creeps closer, his hands empty. He is thinking of fists but lacks the follow-through. For a long, eerie moment, he just looks at her, trying to figure her out. Is she thinking of him or Benten, standing there looking at Benten in Juno’s bed, asleep after hours of whispered conversation? Is she waiting for Benten to creep back down the hall? Is the regret of having them more poignant than the hate of how they turned out?

All right, Juno thinks. Who is he kidding?

And Ma turns to him, a hand rising to her chest. Her eye are black holes. If she looked exhausted last night, now she is a wraith, harsh and beautiful in a way he can only admit to himself now, half-asleep still and half-frozen with terror. Her lip wrinkles. And he doesn’t see her at all: he sees himself in twenty-five years, empty and full of rage. He has her eyes, and they still aren’t beautiful on him.

He stands there, covered in sand, and Ma doesn’t take her hand from the door handle. She stares at him with his eyes, and in the second before her look registers, she looks like a hunter. She stares at him and sees straight through.

“Ma,” he says, and he is the storm.


End file.
